Good Reading Podcast

An elderly couple are driving to the pound. At last, the old lady is getting a dog. The dog is driven through a gate in the fence to its new home. It goes to sleep in front of the black stove, but when it wakes, the old lady is confused. Doesn’t she already have a dog? The old lady slips a pair of pantyhose through the dog’s collar and walks it along the fence. For some reason the gate has disappeared. In the dog’s new home objects are uncoupling from their meaning. Is the dog still a dog? When the gate opens for the very last time will the dog go through? With whimsical drawings from artist Noel McKenna, The Lady with the Dog is a homage to the exquisite sadness of Chekhov’s famous short story. A masterful novella about the importance of animals in language and life. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Carrie Tiffany about the relationship between her story and Anton Chekhov's short story of the same name, how Carrie managed to get inside the head of an Alzheimer's sufferer, and how those muddled conversations with her mother became the foundation of her prose in The Lady with the Dog

They say your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. For Dan Milligan it isn't his life ... it's memories of his dad. Dan has spent his whole life chasing something. Fast cars, leggy blondes, the rush of making a lot of money and the cocaine high to celebrate. But as the stock market plummets in 1987, his world comes crashing down. A new life on the South Coast isn't too bad. Mowing lawns is good, honest work. Most days. But other days, he tells himself he'll get back in the game. He'll get his head together, get his mojo back and master the market again. He just needs some luck. Then one day ... his luck changes. And suddenly he has a choice. Dan has no idea what he could unleash on his life, himself and his family. Or how far he will go to find a way back. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Matt Nable about storytelling from the gritty end of town, how his characters are shaped by research into real world crime , and the distinct and separate creative worlds of screen and page.

What many of us fear, especially as we hit our forties and fifties, is not being as quick of mind. Not remembering as well as we used to. By our 60s and 70s we worry there's nothing we can do and that we are falling helplessly into an abyss which leads to dementia. Dr Norman Swan, one of Australia's most trusted doctors, shows us that we've been thinking about brain ageing the wrong way. It doesn't need to be about decline and deficit. It's about how to help our brains adapt, become resilient and maintain cognitive function - and it's much more than what we eat, how we exercise or our genes. Dr Swan has interviewed people from around the world in their 90s and 100s who still have remarkable cognitive function. These cognitive super-agers have very different life stories, but it turns out that underneath they're pretty much the same, with lessons that will help us all in our 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Dr Norman Swan about why the changes in the brain as we age are more about adaptation than decline, why our genetic make-up isn't as influential on our brain health as we might think, and how the lifestyle choices we make contribute to our brain health.

When the Wet comes to Wyndham, bones wash down with the loose shale of the surrounding Bastion ranges. Year round, lost spirits wander this tiny port town on the northern tip of Western Australia. Some say they belong to the forgotten inmates of an apartheid hospital, built here in 1936 on the foundations of Social Darwinism and eugenics, theories that would reach their horrifying climax in the Holocaust. The Wanted and the Unwanted is the story of the Wyndham Native Hospital, born from a maelstrom of personal animosities, ambitions and beliefs and from the warring spirits of the early twentieth century. It is the tale of a hospital built three miles from a town that banned Aboriginal people, a place where men, women and children were imprisoned, left untreated and subjected to experimental treatments without their knowledge and against their will. And it is the story of those who resisted and survived to transform Three Mile into a place of hope and a site from which a new Wyndham would emerge. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Annabel Stafford about the 'great Australian silence' that obscures our sense of history, the vision and the reality for the Wyndham Native Hospital, and about the cast of white bureaucrats, doctors and politicians who shaped our dark past.

AJ Mackinnon on 'Realms of Gold: The Remarkable Return of Jack de Crow When A.J. 'Sandy' Mackinnon sailed a tiny dinghy through twelve countries from North Wales to the Black Sea, he survived pirates, the English Channel, international incidents and all the disasters, big and small, that can befall a little boat on a long voyage. Those adventures became his beloved bestseller The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow. Decades later, that trip is a happy memory and Sandy is firmly back on land – until a message from a stranger presents an opportunity too good to refuse. Sandy picks up where his first voyage left off, sailing and rowing single-handedly around the coast from Romania to Venice. From Istanbul to Ithaca, Mount Olympus to the ruins of Troy, he finds himself immersed in the legends of antiquity, plays chicken with mercurial border police, and is saved more than once by the kindness of strangers. He recounts it all with his unbreakable enthusiasm and self-deprecating humour, taking the reader on a hilarious and unforgettable adventure. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to A. J. 'Sandy' Mackinnon about the reincarnation of that little mirror dinghy the 'Jack De Crow', the remarkable people he encountered on his journey from the Danube Delta to Venice, and why it's not curiosity alone that drives Sandy in his travels and his storytelling.